Guys- I've accomplished the best of both worlds already by putting a 48GB SSD in the expresscard slot of my 17 inch MBP and booting from that along with using it for applications. I've instructed osx to look for my home directory on the mechanical 500GB drive. This offers a no compromise solution. I simply love it. BTW if anyone wants a 15 inch MBP that still has the expresscard slot, let me know. I've got one for sale.

The title pretty much says it all. with reports that the first retailers and Apple retail locations allegedly receiving their shipments of the next generation MacBook Pros, new rumors have begun to pour in regarding the soon-to-be-refreshed product.

The first, It looks like the new MacBook Pros will feature a MacBook Air-like SSD that will be large enough to hold the OS X core files. This would dramatically increase system speeds, and would allow for boot times similar to the 2010 MacBook Air. It is likely that the notebooks will still include a regular spinning hard drive in order to allow users to have more disk space than the MacBook Air.

The other rumor coming in today is that the trackpad for the new MacBook pro will be even larger than the current models. There's also word that the new notebooks could be as much as 0.5 pounds lighter than current models, which would mean the 13 inch model would approach the weight of the MacBook Air, although it is unlikely that the new MacBook pro will feature the same slim form-factor, as it is expected that the new line will still feature an optical drive.

We'll probably have our answers to whether these rumors are true very soon. All signs point to the release of the new MacBook Pros this week, likely by Thursday.

ssd, hdd, AND optical?? I doubt they can fit that much in the 13" model, it would be the first... ...They definitely cannot fit three 2.5" drive bays in there.

There are hybrid SSD and HDD drives out there, as in an 8 or 16 GB portion for the OS and then ~250 GB for storage. From what I hear there have been a lot of problems with the a Seagate Momentus of this model, I believe. Obviously you wouldn't have to worry about that. Apple isn't going to put a certain piece of hardware into any Apple product unless they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's going to perform. Obviously, there are mistakes, but you see my point.

OR they could simply have the option to remove the SuperDrive and put an SSD in it's place. You can already do this yourself, but official support built into Lion for this would be great.